New Exhibits at Comic-Con Museum Explore ‘Popnology’ and Art of ‘The Sandman’

She has won numerous awards and worked on high-profile projects, but as she previewed an exhibit of her works at the Comic-Con Museum Tuesday, artist Colleen Doran couldn’t help but marvel at how far she and her industry have come.

“We didn’t see that coming back in the day,” said Doran. “We were considered junk culture…To go from that to this, is amazing.”

“Colleen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman” is one of three new exhibits that open Wednesday at the museum located in Balboa Park.

Doran has worked on projects ranging from The Walking Dead to Wonder Woman, but the exhibit features her original art for stories by legendary writer Gaiman.

The art includes works from Gaiman’s famous The Sandman comic book and from other works including Chivalry, Troll Bridge, American Gods and Good Omens.

Doran has known Gaiman since 1989 and acknowledges his literary works can be challenging to translate visually, even thinking early on that she wasn’t a good enough artist to work with the author and having to change her style.

“To me, being a cartoonist is like being an actor and every book is a different role,” she said.

The exhibit includes art in both color and black and white. It also features a video of Gaiman performing a public reading of Chivalry, a fantasy about an elderly British widow who buys what turns out to be the Holy Grail, which brings forth a visit an ancient knight.

The other new exhibits at the museum are:

Popnology: The largest exhibit in the museum takes up most of the ground floor and highlights how technology has been influenced by movies, books, television, art and futurists. It traces how the stuff of science fiction, like how Star Trek communicators, eventually become reality, like the cell phones of today.

The exhibit has several interactive displays where people can operate a robot, see how radio sounds travel through space or pilot a ship on Mars. There is also a quiz about robots, displays about 3D printing, a look at the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and even a comparison on how science was used to confront the challenge of a modern pandemic.

From Big Dots to the Digital Universe: The Evolution of Comic Book Color: This exhibit looks at how the use of color in comic books has evolved over the decades from hand-painted works to digital formats.

Longtime colorist Steve Oliff and his contributions to such works as Akira, Batman and Spawn are highlighted in the exhibit. The exhibit also includes an interactive display showing how color separation is used to bring vibrancy to a comic book.

Oliff calls coloring the “silent soundtrack” to comic books, adding “I wanted this show to be very educational.”